Laila Lalami

Danticat on Iraq

Novelist Edwidge Danticat contributes an Op-Ed piece to the Albany Times Union, in which she compares the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 with that of Iraq. The war that was supposed to bring democracy to the Carribbean island lasted 19 years, though its effects would last many more years. Now, Danticat writes,

Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.

While it takes American leaders and their armed enforcers just a few hours, days, weeks, months to rewrite another sovereign nation’s history, it takes more than 90 years to overcome the devastations caused by such an operation, to replace the irreplaceable, the dead lost, the spirits quelled, to steer an entire generation out of the shadows of dependency, to meet fellow citizens across carefully constructed divides and become halfway whole again.

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